According to the “Rule of Law”, those privatizations dealt with fraud and violations. As to why they are discussing this now and whether they have learned from their mistakes now, we can only assume one thing: it is a pre-election period. Recently the NA speaker, Arthur Baghdasaryan applied to the chief prosecutor to institute legal proceedings connected with the cases of violations fixed in the report of the NA inspection department. This application not only talks about the privatizations of 2001-2003, but also the ones in 2004. There are many interesting things in the report of the NA inspection department regarding the privatizations in 2004. This report states that there are numerous flaws in the 2001-2004 privatization draft program. The report states that as of September 4, 2004, the requirements of the governmental Decision #200-A were not met. According to this decision the governmental bodies had to report detailed information on 197 companies to be privatized, but they failed to do so and the reported information concerned only 92 companies (46,7%). The conclusion of the report is that in the period of the program implementation (2001-2004) the government proceeded bankruptcy proceedings against 67,2% of the companies included in the list (673 out of 1001 companies). 54,7% out of these companies (548) have either gone bankrupt or are still in the process which will lead up to that soon. The NA inspection department also published very interesting information, according to which most of these companies (74%) were privatized exactly during the reporting period, while according to the 2004 budget draft, these privatizations had to be done through fair competitions by presenting business plans of future development of those companies. According to the report of the NA inspection department in this period the Government continued selling state owned companies for only 25% of its real market price, and sometimes even for less money. For instance the report states that the building of “Orbita” was sold only for a sum equal to 5% of its real market price. But in regard to this Andranik Margaryan said that this building was sold for the evaluated sum, but they presented a part of the payment for it as investments. Andranik Margaryan advised the “Rule of Law” to remember that their representatives have always been present at these discussions and not one of them had ever been against any governmental decisions.
Taking into account the fact that as of 2004 some of the companies that were subject to bankruptcy and then privatization, according to the governmental program of 2001-2003 still hadn’t declared bankruptcy and the commissions under the cover of some ministries temporarily managing those companies had not done their work yet, the inspection commission assumes that these works are not either done or are done at a very slow pace. The report also writes that along with the process of privatizing these state companies on the basis of the governmental decision, the Government also privatized other state companies which had not been included in the list of companies to be privatized. Anyhow, these flaws may serve their best in this pre-election period. For example there already is progress, but on the other hand this may be just a demonstration and phoniness. For instance after the referendum Arthur Baghdasaryan announced that there had been violations and ballot “stuffing” during the referendum, he even applied to the chief prosecutor’s office… What could he do?-nothing. What if the chief prosecutor’s office doesn’t consider these facts like the previous ones and doesn’t institute any legal proceedings? And it is quite possible that the chief prosecutor’s office may ask for help from Mass Media to give them information about these privatizations like last time.